you have to be a little bit crazy to survive

Entries tagged with danger

I was part of an elite, armed investigative team going into an ocean-side science station to find out what had happened to it. Only the first part of the station was on land, the rest of which was located underwater, and it was connected by corridors, stairs, and elevators. The first section had bad lighting, papers and equipment scattered everywhere, and finally we started finding bodies as we went into the underwater sections.

The group was split up at some point, and one of the other smaller groups was attacked. A girl survived her initial injuries and we had her resting at the makeshift medical room we set up. My sub-group did some more exploring and had an encounter with another of the things that had attacked her, and they were freakish humanoid forms with weird delicate-seeming spikes and rings of almost barbed-wire shaped protrusions all over their faces.

I don't think I actually managed to kill it, but I was able to clear an area and noticed a map on the wall. It showed a side view of the complex with each area marked as a white rectangle with connections between each section. There were only about four or five sections and it didn't seem to go as far down as it could, more outwards into the ocean water. There was also a second floor section about half-way between the initial entry area and one of the sections out in the water, but I had a feeling the source of the problems was down and not up. I was trying to figure out how to get to the next section further into the water, but ended up going back to where the majority of our people were for the moment.

The girl in the medical room started showing signs of changing into one of the creatures. Stuff was beginning to grow out of her face and she started screaming as the changes became more severe. At some point she calmed down and dazedly suggested she go further into the complex alone, because maybe the creatures would leave her alone now that she was becoming like them. I had a bad feeling she was hurting so bad, she was in fact planning suicide by putting herself at the mercy of the enemy.

She became too disoriented to use for the plan, but one of our big marines was showing signs of changing too, yet he had not been bitten or injured. Did that mean the virulent creature DNA was somehow airborne? His changes weren't as severe, but he had a weird line of almost stitch-looking spines set flush into his skin, that traveled from roughly his chin up across his cheeks to his forehead on both sides of his face. He suggested he should try the plan for getting further into the complex without getting eaten.

My perspective shifted to the marine, and he had already made it much further and deeper into the complex. This area appeared to have been built into solid ground, the shallow end of the ocean floor. I could see a bunch of the creatures ahead, and as they started rushing towards me I thought the plan was going to fail after all. But they slowed down, and then started walking up the side of a ridge of nearby dirt. I had a headset on, and I said over the communications to the rest of the team, "I think they're trying to show me something."

The ridge of packed dirt was taller than me, so it took climbing it to see what lay beyond. I beheld a huge crater, so gigantic it nearly broke my brain and gave me vertigo. But I held my place and tried to figure out what had happened here. The shape of the crater almost made it feel like a ridiculously-huge sphere had once rested here, but really it must have been the end result of a huge excavation. I didn't remember seeing anything like this on the wall map, because a room this size would have dwarfed the scale used in that map. Thus, it was some kind of mega-secret project that had ended up killing a lot of people and turned the rest into aliens.

At the very bottom of the crater I could see what looked like a small exposed edge of dirty, beige-colored metal. Was that part of an alien craft? How come it had not been excavated fully? Had they found other pieces before reaching that one, or was the alien DNA so nasty that it had affected people almost immediately once they started uncovering that piece? Maybe it was some kind of space-microbe on the outside of a ship and nobody had even seen what else lay beneath the dirt.

Back at the command center the team had set up, there were lines of chat on a screen that had been sent from the marine (so much for the audio signal idea). The first two were something along the lines of "Here goes nothing." and "[soldier's name], signing off." Suddenly a new line appeared, in all caps, and it was maybe ten letters smooshed together that indicated the man was still conscious and still at least someone in charge of his own mind.

Then I was Mei in Overwatch, where I was using my ice-blast gun to freeze and kill the alien creatures and they gave experience points every time they died. I was keeping up with respawn so I only had to kill one or two at a time and not a whole room. And finally I woke up.

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Thoughts: I would have liked to have left the end off, but it just kind of shows how doofy the subconscious can be. I had a great, freaky, dark theme going on there, thanks dream! :P I really do wish I could remember what exactly the lines of text were, I almost think part of the last one was "IAMGOOD" but I'm not sure. I also vaguely remember something coming up about depressurization at one point but I am not sure where that fell into the dream and it was most likely one of the more messed up parts of dream logic.

I don't remember the first parts clearly, but this was a really long dream. There were several characters stuck on an island that was having major volcanic activity by surprise. Something had happened to mess up the entire island's geographic ecosystem. Also, there was a factor involved with live dinosaurs being in the park on the island, although it was not until later that the term Jurassic Park was used in conversation. I think maybe in this plot that original concept had failed and somebody else later had tried to "do it right."

The characters that survived the lava and earthquakes managed to get a large black jeep or SUV type vehicle to a complex where they were hoping to find an option for safety or communication or the like. At some point I became a young woman character amongst the others, and there was another lady older than me, a man and a teenage guy, and a little girl of about eight and a boy of maybe five at the most. Their parents were already dead at this point.

In the complex, we were discovering things like rows and rows of empty cubicles and lab rooms that were completely empty of staff and had stuff strewn all over the place. Somebody found a dead body, so we were afraid that something like raptors were loose in the building. The older guy with us had a gun, but was low on bullets. By this time we were realizing that being stuck inside was a bad choice, but had a bad feeling we couldn't go backwards and had no real idea now how deep we were inside the building.

We came across this odd hallway where it branched at a cross-ways, and straight ahead past the intersection there was a thick glass pane set like a wall and we could see very dark hallways beyond. In the hallway to the left, there was a door set into the wall on its right where maybe that weird dark hallway could be accessed through whatever room was inside the door. I told the others to wait, and the kids were all "no don't go, it's too dangerous!" but I went carefully into the mystery room. I don't remember anything specific about it, except that it did lead into that dark hallway, close to the far side of the glass.

I remember feeling very exposed in that hall, and walking back towards the glass to investigate if anything might be worth seeing there, there was a sudden flash of quick, white light somewhere behind me, probably from the ceiling. It reminded me of the speeding cameras at intersections, but it also spooked me and the kids on the far side of the glass were yelling at me to get out of there.

I made it back into the connecting room without incident even though I feared something would get me in that dark hallway. There's a bit of confusion to the dream plot/logic here as I'm not sure if what I saw next was in that connecting room, or in another room near the main hallway intersection. Either way, in whatever room I was in now, I saw a lady with a black evening dress on that had no shoulders, and a bodice made to look a bit like two black flower petals covering her chest.

I think the two kids were in this room with me now, but none of us thought this person was actually here to help us, and she started pulling the top of the dress down. Somehow the older guys out in the hall knew about this, and wanted to see, but the kids and I couldn't get out of that room fast enough. I had a baaad feeling that what was under that dress wasn't human (I remember thinking evil vine-plant-like monster) and from the sounds of gunfire I was correct as we fled down the main hallway (having gone right this time from the original direction we arrived, or in other words, putting the glass-walled dark area to our left in passing).

The other lady in the group had decided to stick back with the dudes even though we told her to run, so it was just me and the two children as we turned a corner left and found two sets of glass double doors side-by-side that we realized could be closed and locked. This doorway would also put us into hallways connecting to the dark area, and the little girl was upset because she said she saw a ghost in the hall with me when the light had flashed earlier. I couldn't figure out what she meant by "ghost" and if she had seen it on the glass or actually in the hall with me, but we were running out of time. I'd rather face a mysterious "ghost" that hadn't killed me the first time (to the point that I hadn't even known it had existed) than get eaten by something.

I told her it would be okay, that we at least knew there was danger where we had been before, including the dinosaurs we still assumed were around somewhere, and we needed to lock the door. We had no idea if the others were even alive at that point, and if we sat around and waited we'd all die. So we started working on the doors, which was really messed up by dream logic and required being closed juuuust so in order for the locks to catch, and of course the doors didn't want to stay shut properly. Then when they did, the locks had turned from more simple rotating latches to something more like the plastic belt connectors you see sometimes on backpacks or amusement park ride seatbelts.

We had just gotten the doors properly locked when the man and the lady arrived on the far side. The teenage boy wasn't anywhere to be seen. They told us to open the doors, and he was being really mean about it, not really pleading but demanding it. I had a really off feeling about him (and I already did from the stupid "hot" lady episode), and if I opened the door for the chick who was stupid enough to hang out with him, I'd be letting him through too. He felt like a danger right now about as bad as the other stuff. At least it seemed he was out of bullets, so they didn't have any real option to get through the door.

As I was debating for a moment, he suddenly made a sort of "boo" face at us through the glass, including spreading the fingers out on his hands next to his face. I realized at that point that my impression was correct, even more so... we had no value to this man. I shook my head, said, "...sorry..." and took off with the kids.

As we ran quickly through darkened hallways and rooms that had absolutely nothing in them, I held the girl's hand and she had her little brother's. I told the girl to hold onto her brother's hand like their lives depended on it (which technically they did), and that if I had to I would hold both their hands but it seemed like I needed one free right now. I was using it to open doors at this point, and we were making fast progress even though we had no real idea where we were going. At this point it was mostly just knowing we were getting away from previous problems.

Suddenly one of the doors led us into a room crammed with office supplies and other junk, but more importantly, there were windows around the back-right and back walls. Daylight! There were desks along the back wall (also piled with stuff) but with enough room to climb up and open the windows. I opened one, and found that there was only a simple window screen between us and freedom. I could see that we could make it to the ground below, as we were on the second floor, but we were going to be okay! I was thrilled, and somehow could even tell that the surrounding area was relatively safe... that's right, it was raining. There was something about rain making the environment safe, I can't remember why. The dinosaurs were allergic to rainwater? Who knows.

In the meantime, suddenly a gust of wind blew what seemed like a whole bunch of mosquitoes into the room. The kids freaked out and told me to close the window, and in confusion I remembered the screens and then noticed that the lower half had much larger, almost artistically-placed holes in the screenwork. (I think the dream was just trying hard to fill a plot hole on the fly.) Then I noticed where the breeze was whipping stuff outside past the other windows, and that it looked a whole lot like tiny fluffy-ended flower or tree seedlings gusting around.

I told the kids this, that it wasn't bugs, and that held in the logic and vanished from being a dream element. At this point we were preparing to get the heck out of there, and thinking maybe there were a few things that could be scavenged from the room (like rain jackets or plastic trash bags to use as such) although we weren't going to take more than a moment or two. For some reason I had taken my shoes and socks off to get up onto the desk, or so now the dream decided. So I was fishing around in the junk on the floor for my shoes and started putting my socks back on.

The girl told me she thought I should bring the (possibly Pokémon?) cards with me, as she said she had a feeling they would be on the mantle in the new place we would get when we got free of this. Suddenly the plot element was added that I had been carrying (...how?? lol) a pillowcase with the cards as well as other regular playing cards and something similar. The entire thing was a bit on the heavy side, so I asked about the other cards, and she giggled and said they weren't necessary or entirely optional.

I said something in agreement to that, I can't remember what, and I think I was about to clear the bag out so there were only the cards cute lil' miss possibly-psychic wanted to see in the future home we were apparently going to share... which did seem right, I'd built up a connection with these kids during the adventure...

I'm not sure how this dream started, but I know at some point the Star Trek episodes I'd been watching before sleeping inspired a rocket launch that contained a nuclear warhead. The dream-plot idea was that it had to explode in the atmosphere way before it hit its actual target, and I knew that whoever had sabotaged the rocket had succeeded. This seemed to be fairly modern-day, except for the 60's style rocket.

The launch point was on the far side of a large city; I was currently in the outskirts. I was running towards a waterfront area as the rocket launched, and I kept looking back to see it get higher and higher. I knew I could only run so fast, and that if I was still in danger I was toast anyways, but I was still trying to get some more distance and possibly find better cover. I also didn't want to miss the explosion... you only see that once in a lifetime.

I was still in a fairly large parking lot when the rocket exploded into a huge fireball that glowed brighter than the sun. There were bits coming off it, huge flaming trails of fiery death-stuff, and those things were making it further than the main explosion, which was now a problem as they could possibly reach as far as me.

One did, and sent a semi truck blasting into the air sideways towards me. It was rolling as I ducked to the ground, and for a moment I think I half-realized I was dreaming. I forgot again a moment later, but in the meantime convinced my subconscious mind that the truck managed to hit other stuff or roll just right to merely halt above me instead of squishing me.

Now I had some cover, and after a moment of "gee I almost just died" I crawled out from under it and looked around. The explosion in the sky was dissipating but I knew I still needed to keep moving. I continued my run towards the waterfront and down a boardwalk that led past some one-story hotel rooms. I went into one, and found two girls sitting at a table.

The three of us girls started making a plan for... something... it seems like it was more than just getting out of the city... possibly something more to do with the rocket conspiracy. I can't remember as the details get fuzzy there, I just remember us standing around a small, white, round table talking about things. I also remember there were little black round things that the two girls kept playing with, almost like clumps of play-dough.

I'm not sure how the dream started, but the first part I remember vaguely was almost like watching television or stock footage of meteorites or fallen space debris landing on earth, creating craters and blowing through buildings like they were nothing.

The next part I remember more clearly was being in front of the double doors of a small building that had a dock attached to it; the water was either a lake or a large inlet from the ocean. The doors were behind me, there was a grassy area to the right where one could access the dock/building, and then the dock stretched out in front of me. Above the entrance area where I was standing, there was a patio cover for shade and the sky directly above wasn't visible because of it. It was daytime and sunny.

The idea of meteorites was sticking in the dream plot, and there were other people under the shade with me. A bunch of them went inside because they were afraid of getting hurt, but I knew it didn't make a bit of difference trying to hide in a building and instead went to peeked out from under the shade. I saw very high up two little meandering white trails in the partly-cloudy sky. The trails moved quickly but oddly enough they weren't straight lines like one would expect from a meteorite. I knew that's what they were though.

There was a black guy who seemed to have a sense of humor about the whole thing but he was still staying completely under the shade. I moved back a couple steps to tell him what I'd seen, and managed to convince him to go look again with me. Now the trails being left by the incoming things were straight, and it seemed like they were coming almost right at us. Then we realized they were and we ducked back under the shade as one of them landed maybe a few yards away on the grass and bounced a couple of times (dream logic fail), still heading for me particularly.

I fell down backwards and landed sitting just before the thing stopped right next to me. I was quite a bit surprised, but since it was there I touched it. It looked like a chunk of ice maybe the size of a loaf of bread at most and felt smooth and slightly warm. Then I made a joke to the black guy, something along the lines of, "Well, if it's got a space virus on it, I've got it now," as I rubbed the fingers together that had touched the thing.

There was some kind of low booming vibration noise now, and I went to look more to the right of the shaded area (though we were still under it) with the black guy. We could now see that we'd missed the impact of a huge meteorite far off in the distance in some mountains. The smoke cloud now rising from that area made it hard to see exactly what was going on, but it almost looked like the meteorite was as big as the smoke cloud was round, which would make it several miles in diameter.

Then our attention was drawn back to the water, where we'd missed yet another hit very much closer, and oddly enough it didn't seem to be making noise like expected. The strike had landed in the water about twenty yards from the end of the dock. Again there was the impression that the meteorite was as big as the smoke cloud rising from it, and the smoke and water seemed to be boiling with the meteorite only partly submerged. Then the smoke cleared like dramatic cinematography special effects to reveal a large black sphere with an oily, shiny surface.

The black dude had enough and ran for the doors, but I walked towards the sphere instead and remember saying out loud, "I've seen this somewhere before..." almost like a suppressed memory was trying to get through. The guy was yelling at me but I was half-entranced by the thing. Then an invisible, powerful force pulled me off the dock and through the air towards the sphere as if I were nothing. I knew it was the sphere doing this, and that it was intelligent.

I had a sense that I was in danger, but was still fairly mesmerized by the sphere. I held my hands out to it like I wanted to touch it, and it seemed like it was looking at me somehow even if the surface didn't change. It had me slowly circling it towards the side away from the building, and then suddenly it moved me faster so I was behind it and out of sight of the others. Part of the sphere's side started shifting and stretching and making a hollow area in its side and then I was sucked into it. The stuff closed around me and I realized I couldn't move, or breathe, and there was no light at all.

The next thing I remember, I must have "woken up" from blacking out or something because I found myself in what looked like underground interconnecting rooms of a city building somewhere. There were a lot of exposed pipes and concrete walls, floor, and ceiling. A guy was there, white this time and probably in his 40's, he seemed like military or ex-military and was dressed in casual clothing. He told me his resistance group had saved me from the sphere, as they already knew somehow that even with all things the alien spheres were immune to, they could be defeated with soda pop.

He said they'd cleared a lot of it out of my system but that there was still some there. I discovered this was true while trying to clear my throat, and coughed up nasty black stuff onto the floor. The guy had a can of pop and used some of it on the black stuff to make sure it was dead (I don't really remember what it did). I think he said that I could eat something to regain strength, but that their doctor wanted me to drink a bunch of soda sometime soon and get the rest of the junk cleared out (which would mean throwing up a lot ^^; ). I decided to go find the doctor and get it done sooner than later.

I'm not exactly sure how this one started, but there was a problem inside the ground floor of a building in an area that was something like a college campus or possibly a government or business plaza with the same sort of feel to it. I remember as the plot moved along elsewhere (the plot that I can't remember now, guh), I saw the Tardis appear somewhere out of the way, like a cut-to shot in a TV show.

The problem was in a specific room in this building, and outside of the room was a hallway and small lobby with the main doors to the outside. The Doctor (10th, as in Hot Scottish Doctor) and Rose went into the room to try and fix it while I stayed out in the lobby. Whatever they were trying to do to fix it apparently made things much worse, and suddenly they came running out of the room. A few moments later a large black sphere that was growing from the central point of the "problem" began to show through the walls of the room.

It was some kind of black hole, except without the gravitational pull and anything that it touched simply ceased to exist wherever it fell into that space. And since the thing was growing steadily larger, that was going to be an issue especially as it seemed this growth wouldn't stop possibly ever. At this point, dream logic started substituting the wrong people in for the Doctor but we'll just keep calling him that and move on.

Dream logic also shortly failed by putting the singularity out in the lobby as if it had always been there, and it was now about a foot shorter than an average person, and floating just above the floor. Due to the fact that running away was just delaying the inevitable (which didn't stop most people who knew about it), I stood on the far side of the thing from the Doctor as we tried to puzzle out some way to stop it. He finally said something to the effect of, "Oh, whatever," and smacked it with his hand.

This worked. His hand didn't disappear forever into it, instead deflating the part he hit as if it were a big balloon whose surface gave to pressure, like rising dough. So we both set about smacking the thing to diminish its size, and this continued to work until it was so small it fit in a ziplock sandwich bag (which, yes, somehow decided to materialize in the dream). It was breaking up into tiny bits at this point, and it looked like teeny grains of black, round sand.

I was the only one doing anything to it right now, as shaking the bag continued to shrink the stuff. But I decided to stop for a moment and we watched it to see if it would stay like that. The tiny spheres started growing again and I felt one bite into the skin of my finger where it was under the bag. Well so much for that, I went back to jiggling the things into nonexistence. And thus they were gone, to jubilations from the froofy-haired Doctor.

(The roleplay characters in question were two initial concepts I had daydreamed up and Zombie-kun now plays Dimitri while I play Ian. Dimitri is somewhere in his 20's and takes care of Ian who is 13-14, and they are escaping 1920's Russia as the older one works to afford transportation and whatnot. Ian has amnesia from a terrible event that Dimitri rescued him from, and trusts Dimitri implicitly; they had not met before that incident. It's a really sweet story in the making ^_^ but anyways, those are the two characters.)

It was almost like some kind of fantasy world and Dimitri/Ian's story combined together to form the dream setting. Dimitri and Ian were in this odd observation room, and the monitors showed views outside of a yellow-orange wind-smoothed limestone hillside, especially one part that was a more flat vertical surface. There were giant yellow ants all around, a little taller than a tall person, though pretty soon they went into a hidden door in that flat part of the hill.

Dimitri for some reason wanted to go talk to the ants for help and told Ian to stay in the room. At this point I became Ian and watched on the monitors as Dimitri tried knocking on the hidden door and was let inside.

I realized that even though Dimitri had left me behind to stay safe, I didn't feel safe anywhere other than with him, and even if something bad was about to happen to Dimitri (had a bad feeling about that) I didn't care, I was going to go be with him. So I was headed off to find the secret door... and as logic failed completely I think I did get reunited with him, and my presence might actually have been helping the situation with the ants (like they didn't believe Dimitri was taking care of someone else like he said he was).

At first I was myself trying to do driving errands in the daytime before a really bad storm hit... running around Home Depot and not finding what I was looking for, then realizing what I wanted wouldn't even be in a Home Depot (and I don't remember now what it was I wanted). Weirdly enough by the time I was leaving I was in a wheelchair (one of the store ones). I remember knowing I didn't need it, but I was trying to pretend that I did. Once I was outside (and walking) again, I couldn't find the vehicle I'd been using.

Logic was already failing so badly by now, but it completely merged into a whole new thought. It was evening now, and dark out. Somewhere in this area was a large building used for meeting spaces and such. The story plot changed completely to being a Denzel Washington movie type idea, except it was real and I was his wife (and I was black too). We were there at the meeting place because he'd landed this big promotion or job or something he was so excited about, but when he went in to talk to the big wigs he came back all freaked out and stressed to the max.

The bigwigs had come back with him to continue the discussion though it sort of seemed like things had at least already been partly decided. It turns out that there for some reason was no proof that he was the father of my two kids (yesh we had kids says the dream logic XDD;; ) and we like always considered them formally adopted but now it was like he'd have to pay the company a bunch of money for them, to be on his health insurance and whatnot. I could tell how upset he was and it was like they'd pretty much succeeded in convincing him this was necessary, and I never got a figure for what they were asking for the kids but it must have been outrageous (and we were already a well-to-do family).

I got up and took my husband by the arm and said we were leaving. Outside I told him that the job wasn't worth it and WTF did they think they were doing? He was kinda agreeing, as if he were coming out of some kind of fog their manipulations had placed him under, and I had a feeling I'd pulled him out of a really bad situation.

Then logic failed completely and I don't remember any more of this sequence.

I was a preteen-ish girl in a generic family at first (nobody I know in real life). A mother, father, me, an older brother maybe, an older sister or two; all of us were wearing bathing suits and it was night time. We were walking home from the beach, along a wooden pathway running between some wooden beach buildings into a more forested area. As we got to an intersection of these walkways, it was suddenly very dark on the part where I and my mother and one sister were. It was almost like literally inky black, while the rest of the area was more well-lit.

We had been discussing self defense and the concept of bad guys assaulting people. Suddenly I started screaming like I knew there were bad guys in the darkness trying to get us. Dream logic was failing (worse) at this point, as it was almost like I was trying to make there be bad guys there, and then they were there trying to drag us off the walkways into a bit of swampy stuff below. We couldn't see who the attackers were, it was too dark. I also remember being scared once the enemies were actually real. They were trying to kidnap us! We were the president's family, the dream suddenly decided, and somebody was trying to take us away!

Then my father, yes, now President Obama, came to help us out of the dark stuff, as if he could pull us up out of it... which... worked. The bad guys no longer existed, and it was as if I'd done something goofy and just freaked everybody out in the process. (Technically, that's exactly what happened, but wtf dream logic faaail!) We were safe and everything was fine, yet I remember wondering where the Secret Service was, because they weren't around us or anywhere in sight. My father was leading the lot of us and a little ways ahead.

There was now another man walking along with us, and a boy with him that the man said he knew. I didn't know either of them. I had a branch of holly in my hand (and I have no idea where it came from now) and decided to go up to talk to my father. I was carrying on like a brat, whining about the holly because I'd lost some of it, plus it was hurting my fingers, but I wanted to know if he'd get me some more. And then I whispered really quietly, "He knows." I think this was some bizarre half-plot idea that the dream dropped as soon as it thought of it, as if the stranger guy had something to do with a conspiracy against my father. Like, Obama was going incognito or hiding out or something. But then it was back to "Wah! I want holly!" and wondering where the Secret Service was. They still hadn't shown up.

I was an Australian girl of about 12 years old sneaking through the dark in an attempt to let some kangaroos out of the evil McLeach's fenced off property. (McLeach is the villain from Disney's The Rescuers Down Under.) Also on this mission was Cooch (nature-happy treehugger type character from the Aussie comics Footrot Flats, skinny guy of indeterminate age). We split up and he went further towards McLeach's homestead. I made it to the part of the fence I wanted to cut but what I thought was going to be easy wasn't; McLeach had put in a very strong, brand new barbed wire fence that was quite tall. Luckily I'd brought wire cutters and wasn't afraid to take a little extra time.

I cut the section of fence I was by, but then I heard animal friends shouting that McLeach had just gotten into his truck at his house and was on his way to look for troublemakers. (Yeah, apparently I could talk to animals.) I was worried about Cooch but at this point it was everyone for themselves because if McLeach caught *anyone* it would be bad news for whoever got caught. I could see Cooch further up the road trying to find a hole in the fence on the other side (not McLeach's fence). I'd lost my wire cutters somehow, so I had to squeeze through the barbed wire on the non-McLeach side of the road. I found a space big enough but got scraped up a bit.

McLeach found the big hole in his fence and was quite upset. He had at least one or two dogs with him. He started looking around for who might have done it and calling out taunts, knowing I was probably still close enough to hear. Meanwhile I was busy trying to keep quiet; I was making my way fairly quickly along the bottom of a cliff but I was still too close to the road. I knew the fence wouldn't stop him if he figured out where I was even though it marked someone else's property.

I remember getting away and finding friends again, but for some reason as I was telling them what happened the dream rewound to the point where the animals were screaming it was time to run. This time I ran the other way along the road, further away from McLeach's place, with no real intention of trying to crawl through the fence to someone else's land. The road was very open and there were now two people with me, random people who I guess were on my side (stupid dream logic). There was nowhere to hide because of high fences, but then we found a tree at a corner and climbed it. This was a great idea at first but then the tree became flimsy and we were trying to hold the branches up, keep still, and look like tree parts ourselves. It was also suddenly broad daylight which made it even harder to hide.

McLeach drove by and stopped. He looked up at the tree and started making comments about it, meanwhile everybody in it was scared to death he was gonna see us. He didn't for the moment.

I don't remember the first part of this dream, except that it seems like I'd been accused of handling something wrong, maybe to the point that someone had gotten hurt or killed. But I do remember being asked to explain exactly what happened, and as I started explaining it the explanation became reality. I was only vaguely myself and seemed more like a woman a few years older than my real persona, and I was in a room in my house with two children, both girls around age eight to ten. Some sort of huge natural disaster struck, all I knew at first was that it involved a lot of water.

There was a strange square-shaped depression in the floor that we could basically fit into, like a step or two down with some vaguely alien-like architecture that looked like support beams coming out of the corners of this thing (on floor level) and going diagonally up to meet each other above the center of the square "hole." On the top of this thing was a small pyramid thing that could have been a roof if the thing was bigger and not sitting in this room. (I remember thinking it was vaguely Sith-looking in origin, it reminded me of the ancient Sith architecture on Korriban in the game Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic.) The point of noticing this thing is that I knew it might help keep me and the girls safe if we could stay inside it. The water might not be able to rush us out of the room and kill us or spread us too far apart to be able to help each other if injury occurred. So I got the girls to go into this thing with me and I laid down on the bottom with them, one girl under each arm, and all of us facing downwards. I hung on tight to them as the water rushed through the room (it seems like we had a few moments warning before this thing hit). It worked, we were okay and the flooding moved on (or whatever was going on was done with us, we weren't still sure what was going on).

The room was still more or less intact but really messy now, and very wet. There were other people in the house, and I knew I had to check on them. I told the girls to stay in this room. I'm almost thinking it was a first level room or even a basement, which seems like an odd place to stay during a water catastrophe but I think I knew it was over, so since there wasn't tons of water in the room I figured it was safe enough. I also somehow knew that this disaster had incapacitated at least the entire United States. I asked one of the girls if she wanted anything, and she said somewhat spitefully, "Crackers." (Her attitude made sense in the dream, but I'm forgetting bits... it seems like there had been some argument earlier about crackers.) I left the room and went to the front door (the house layout is really murky now, I'm not sure it made sense) and found a teenage boy who I think was supposed to be my son. (At this point some John Grisham-like flavor got thrown into the dream, almost like I was a high-priced lawyer or something who worked too much.) There was also someone else there, probably another family member (not my real family, but this made-up dream family of which at least one of the girls mentioned earlier was part of).

My attention was on the boy though, I wanted to ask him if he was okay and if there was anything he needed but as I started asking, I realized I wasn't even sure what his name was. This was supposedly my kid, and I was so disconnected from my family I couldn't even remember his name! So I appologized and told him I understood it was very careless and wrong of me to have let my life go where it had gone, but at the moment would he please tell me his name and if there's anything he needs? He said, "Mitch," and he was looking at me with sarcastic disgust. I did a double take, and told him I wondered why the heck one of my kids got a name like that, and it almost felt like I got the vague notion of some larger conspiracy. I told him we'd figure things out if we could, and I asked him to go join the girls in the room they were in. The other person went too.

I found a full or almost-full box of saltine crackers and I knew it was the one the girl had asked for earlier. I picked it up and went back to the room where everybody else was now. My food stamps card was there on a table, and it's almost like I used it at that moment to buy the crackers somehow. I was thinking that the card might not work during such a state of disaster, but it cleared the order without problems. Mind you, there's no grocery store present, just this room with my apparently-estranged family. Plus, weren't the crackers at home and mine already in the first place? Stupid dream logic. But I was happy to get my food stamps card back (it was almost like I had to get the crackers to do so) and now I thought perhaps the government had put an unlimited dollar amount on all food stamps cards during this state of emergency.

I called to attention the people in the room and asked them if there was any one single item in the house that they could not live without or absolutely had to have. I told them they should go find it right now and come back here immediately. I said, "If we get raided then you'll probably have lost that thing, and since we don't know what we're going to do yet or where were going to go or what we're going to take, you'll at least have that one thing here where it's safe." I was worried about looting, and I'd figure at first we'd fortify our position in this room and worry about what to do next after that.

One or both of the girls got up (they were still hanging around that weird thing in the floor) and I think the other person (not my son but whoever it was that was with him earlier) was making for the door; they were going to go get whatever thing it was that they wanted most badly. Mitch however didn't seem all that inclined to get going, and I said something like, "If there's nothing here that's so very important to you well then good for you," or something like that. That was some attempt on my part to imply that I knew possessions were just mostly junk and not as important as people... or something. Mitch said, "Well, I do have a lot of movies but there's so many of them." He still didn't seem like he was gonna go find something. I was on my way out the door at this point, and I said, "Well, I have a teddy bear that's not really replacable, as opposed to Jurassic Park which is."